


an android walks home alone at night

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 06:21:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3885649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"An android walks home alone at night from the hill in the woods, but suddenly he's not alone."</p><p>Vision discovers life, and a stranger discovers Vision.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an android walks home alone at night

**Author's Note:**

> My current big project is kicking my butt and I needed a way to feel better about AoU. So, this.

i.

An android walks home alone at night. He’s been of this world for three weeks, and the others call him The Vision but he had never seen the stars with his own two mechanical eyes. In the city, New York, the lights of the tall, tall buildings blot out the stars like thumbs plugging a leak in the cover of night. He supposes it keeps Stark comfortable, the uniform tableau a means to feel safe--deep and thick--when the shaking grips his fingers, when he keeps staring at the empty corner of the lab with the equipment gathering dust. But Vision finds it suffocating, in the figurative sense.

In the country, the woods--upstate New York, the new Avengers facility, names he’s etching into his hard drive--the night is inky and speckled and bottomless. He wants to see the stars, live up to his name. He finds a hill in the woods with the crest above the treeline and lies there every night for hours. It’s quiet and peaceful and worlds away from the screaming burning metal and rock crumbling into the sky from his birth. (Or: not worlds away, not actually, but it might as well be.)

An android walks home alone at night from the hill in the woods, but suddenly he’s not alone.

“Hello?”

The man behind him doesn’t speak. His arm is made of metal and Vision feels something swell in him. Recognition, empathy, affection: he hasn’t been able to pin these down yet, these names for the internal ebbs and flows.

“Are you lost?”

“They were following me and then they weren’t. I was worried,” the man says.

“They?”

The man looks past him, just over his shoulder to where the trees edge away from each other before melting out to the clearing. “Their trail ends here.”

Vision turns to look in case he’s missed something but the shadows are all the same as he left them, pooling around the walls and trunks without a single care to the light of the stars above them. When he turns back around, the man is gone.

ii.

An android floats to his hill alone at night--the ground is slick with ice from the freezing rain and while it would not hurt, he does not care to fall. Clouds pass above and the moon is new, a dark bruise against the obscured sky, and when he arrives at his hill, he finds he has to share.

The man is back. He sits cross-legged and his neck cranes up. Vision thinks he might be squinting, but he doesn’t know why. There’s nothing to see--it’s the New York sky tonight, not the one he comes for, but habit is hard to break.

“Have you found them?”

“They’re here. In the building.”

Vision sits beside him, hovering just above the frost-tipped grass. He notes the position of the man’s legs and shifts his until they match. “Who are you?

“I don’t know.”

The same sensation from the night before tugs at something in his chest. “I understand,” he says before he knows he’s going to say it.

They sit and the night passes and for Vision it’s not like clockwork because it _is_. It _is_ clockwork. He can sense the time ticking by somewhere behind his eyes, in the center of his head--his hairless head, he notes, glancing at the man’s tangles. And still the man doesn’t move. There’s nothing to see in the sky that night, and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

Until he turns: he moves the neck from that bent angle and scans Vision’s body, down and back again. “Are you a robot?”

“I am the Vision. An android.”

His mouth opens, then closes. And again. And again. Vision’s hearing is working, he knows it is. He’s not missing anything. There isn’t anything to miss. But finally it comes: “So you were made?”

“Yes.”

“I understand.”

iii.

An android descends into the woods from a sunset flight alone at dusk. The stars aren’t out yet, but they will be. He only has to wait. The night comes slowly but consistently, a gentle blend into the black and the patterns splashed into it overhead. At the facility Rhodes mentioned constellations, and Vision knew about them in abstract, could find them on that first night, but they didn’t mean much to him. Not what they were expected to.

The last traces of sunlight disappear beyond the horizon and Vision hears footsteps, now familiar.

“You were made--made for what?”

“I was meant to aid Ultron in ending the human race, but that didn’t go according to plan.” In the dark, the man cocks his head slightly. “I am on the side of life,” he says. The refrain: it’s reassuring. The more he says it--to others, to himself under his breath laying on top of his hill--the truer it sounds.

“You were made?” he asks the man.

“I think.” His metal hand flexes, glinting even in the dark. “I don’t know how else I got this way.”

“And what were you made for?”

He doesn’t answer for minutes. The stars nudge forth above them as he shifts from one foot to the other. Back again. Back again. “Killing,” he says finally. “Death. But that’s not--that’s not the side I’m on. Not anymore.”

He looks into the distance, towards the muted lights coming from the facility.

“What side are you on?"

“His.”

“Whose?”

“ _His_.” The man’s voice breaks but his spine reasserts itself, straightens out-- _defiant_ , says a voice in Vision’s head. He doesn’t press him; he doesn’t want to, and he doesn’t know how.

They sit in silence together for the rest of the night, and Vision decides he prefers the waves of color in the sunrise.

iv.

An android walks home alone at night, but he’s not an android. Only a limb is metal, and maybe some things inside holding broken bits together, so he’s human. He knows this--he knows this now.

And he’s halfway certain that this isn’t actually his home. The beacon for home is pointing wildly, frenzied, in so many directions: south and east and straight up into the sky. But he’s here. He was led here, and he trusts that.

He knocks and waits--searches for a doorbell, but the door opens. The man on the bridge.

“Bucky.”

The sun starts shining again.

 

 


End file.
